


The Rubicon

by TheTacosGrim



Series: Brimstone [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Because Supernatural, Big Brother Michael, Gen, Hunter Michael, Hunters are angels, Lucifer is Called Luke, M/M, Pre-Slash, Reaper Adam, Temporary Character Death, angels are human
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-10
Updated: 2016-07-10
Packaged: 2018-07-22 15:39:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7444624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheTacosGrim/pseuds/TheTacosGrim
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Michael Shurley sees reapers. One reaper, actually. Adam finds this incredibly fascinating. </p><p>(Or, time stamps from hunter Michael Shurley's run-ins with Death's quirky understudy - from life to death and back again.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Rubicon

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! The feed on this pairing has been a little slow, so I thought I'd toss out this little file that's been sitting on my computer for a while. If you enjoy it, feel free to let me know. I've got more ideas, as this is part of a series involving the Supernatural Reverse!verse and our favorite dysfunctional families. Ultimately, I'd love to continue if the interest is out there! No beta. All mistakes are mine.
> 
> (Just as an FYI, I tend to see a several - if not most - of the Shurley kids being adopted in this au given the large family and how relatively close they are in age. That said, that information never made it into this fic because it's from Michael's perspective, and he doesn't really care if they're related by blood or not. They're his siblings so it's a non-issue. Title is a reference to the phrase 'Crossing the Rubricon.')

The first time Michael sees the reaper, he’s ten and sitting in the living room of the Shurley family home. Anna is tucked into his right side, sleeping with her head on his shoulder. Gabriel sits a few feet away, wide eyes glued on the TV screen. It’s one of the few things that can hold his attention for more than a few minutes, and it's done a decent job of doing just that for the past two hours. Michael has the cartoon turned up loud to drown out the noise, but it only half works. Raphael sits on the side of Michael Anna isn't occupying, her small fingers playing sleepily with Michael’s jacket sleeve. Her eyes are already half shut despite the periodic  _thumps_  and screeches from the basement. Most of this is familiar business already. 

Luke sits in the floor, back propped up against the footrest of the couch. Michael knows better than to talk about the way he leans into his older brother’s leg or the way pale blue eyes periodically switch from their vigil over Gabriel to throw a questioning ( _demanding_ ) look at Michael.

Michael shakes his head every time. Father told him to watch his siblings, so he is; he’s making sure they don’t run into the basement and see the monster hiding in mother’s skin. As soon as baby Castiel stops squirming against his chest and sleeps, Michael reaches down to card his fingers comfortingly through his other brother’s blonde hair like he used to when it was just the two of them. Luke scowls at first, like he’s going to protest, but an inhuman screech cuts over the TV’s cheerful announcement of ‘ _That’s right! There are_ four _blue circles!_ ’ 

Luke flinches while Gabriel laughs and claps.

“It’s okay,” Michael lies.

Luke goes rigid – knows the lie for what it is – but a glance at Gabriel and he goes quiet. Michael breathes out his relief in a sigh.

An hour later and the screeching has tampered down into the occasional  _thump_  and father’s voice with words Michael doesn’t understand. Gabriel has crawled into Luke’s lap. Judging by the way the blonde head is tipped back against Michael’s knee, they’re both asleep despite the blaring TV.

It’s dark. Father said to go to the garage if he isn’t out by morning. Michael doesn’t know what that means, but he knows it’s bad. He prays to the angels that father is back before that.

Twenty minutes later, he only sees the man because he turns the TV off at the right moment. He goes rigid at the unfamiliar reflection standing in the doorway behind the couch. The charmed knife is in his pocket, which means he’ll have to wake Anna and Castiel to get it. He'll have to be quick. But the man is only there long enough to look surprised at Michael’s tension and smile a sad, sympathetic smile before he’s gone in a blink.

The sound of water comes from the shower in the basement seconds later. Father comes up a few minutes after it stops. His eyes are dark with grief and exhaustion.

Mother doesn’t come up the stairs with him.

The warmth leeches out of Michael’s arms. It’s odd because, under the weight of his siblings, he’d been too hot just a minute ago. Father kneels in front of the couch, next to Luke without waking him or Gabriel. He tries to smile, but it’s more of a twitch than anything. “You did good,” he says, straightening out Michael’s dark hair with a shaking hand, “Thank you, son.”

Michael swallows his questions and fights against the sudden blur of his vision. He nods instead.

Father looks like he’s going to say something. He hesitates and the pause catches. He reaches into his coat pocket and pulls out a necklace. Something churns in Michael’s gut when he recognizes mother’s simple, wooden rosary as father slips it over his head. “I’m so sorry,” he whispers, and cold, horrible knowledge dawns in Michael’s mind.

It takes weeks for the shock to fade enough to remember the man he’d seen reflected in the blank TV screen. He thinks about it when he isn’t taking care of Gabriel, Raphael, and Castiel; when he isn’t trying to sooth Anna’s grief; when he isn’t trying to cook meals, fill in the cracks in their lives, or coax Luke from his heated glares and long silences without escalating into full out shouting from both parties. 

He thinks that he’s seen the Angel of Death, and he doesn’t know what to do with that because he’s too busy trying to glue and tape his world back together while pieces just keep breaking off.

 

 

 

The second time, he’s barely eighteen, and he’s leaning against the wall, blinking through rage and agony and grief like he’s never known. Luke is… He isn’t completely human, Gabriel is  _still_  crying ( _is always going to have the scar_ ), and how the  _hell_ did everything go so wrong? 

Luke is gone. He’s fifteen and alone on the streets with nothing because everything is still in his room, and—

What has he done?

He squeezes his eyes shut and tries to get a hold of himself. 

Gabriel. 

Gabriel needs his big brother now because Castiel, for all his desire to help, doesn’t know how to change a field dressing yet.  _Just a minute_ , he tells himself. They need him to be strong right now, and he’s not. He feels horrible and cold and numb with guilt and betrayal. His fingers close around the rough edges of the old rosary wrapped around his wrist, and he forces himself to breathe, steady and even.

It’s an old, familiar habit, and the ball of panic in the back of his mind slowly unwinds.

When he opens his eyes, the reaper is there again, watching him from the corner of Luke’s room. Michael is on his feet in an instant. He knows the lore about reapers—knows fighting is futile—but the only person in the house that’s injured is Gabriel, and he’s  _not_  screwing up a second time today.

The blonde tilts his head and holds his hands out in a gesture of surrender. “Easy,” he says, lips curling into an amused smile, “So you  _can_ see me.”

“If you take him,” Michael swears, “I will find a way to end you.”

The reaper tilts his head curiously, like he’s confused. “You couldn’t fight me anyway,” he points out like it’s a non-issue, “But— Hey!“

Something  _breaks_  inside Michael’s head. Before he registers the flash of surprise in wide, blue eyes, he’s already shoving the reaper against the wall. They jar hard enough for Luke’s books, worn with care and use, to spill from the bookshelf and onto the floor. It’s the last thing the oldest Shurley can take before he surrenders to the blind fury that’s been hours in the making. 

The few times he lands punches, his knuckles give before the reaper’s skin does. It’s like hitting rock, but he’s too far gone to care and the reaper, he has the terrible suspicion, just lets him. Glass and trinkets shatter around them, and Michael’s rage builds with each precious little memory of his brother broken around them like some awful cliché cosmic metaphor.

All he can think is ' _Not Gabriel, too_.' 

They end up on the floor, the human straddling the reaper. It’s only when Michael’s bloody knuckles leave tracks on the reaper’s cheek that the blonde finally grabs his hands in a grip like steel. He hisses at the pressure against the abused, raw skin of his knuckles. The damn reaper looks up at him somewhere between long-suffering patience and boredom. “Feel better?” he asks dryly, already knowing the answer.

Michael huffs, jaw clenched at the futility of it all. “You can’t have him.”

The reaper rolls his eyes. It’s the first time Michael actually  _looks_  at him. He looks young – maybe a handful of years older than Michael himself. “Yeah. You said that before,” he says, “And if you’d  _listened_  before you flew off the handle, you’d know my business was with your neighbor—not your brother.” There’s a pause while the rage bleeds into exhaustion and shame. Then the reaper wiggles his hips, jarring Michael back to reality and the absurdity of the situation. “Look, as cute as the he-man thing is, buy me dinner first?”

Michael scrambles back onto his heels, face hot with shame and surprise. Whatever he’d been expecting from the angels of death… this isn’t it. “Why are you here?” he asks, too exhausted and numb to deal with politeness. 

The reaper pushes himself up and straightens out his clothes with an indignant huff. They’re… surprisingly normal: jeans, a t-shirt, jacket, and sneakers. He looks like any normal person walking down the road, but maybe that’s the point: some mechanism to make death less terrifying. “I was curious, okay?” he admits with a put-upon sigh, “I thought you saw me last time. Which you shouldn’t be able to do, by the way. It’s freaky.”

Michael blinks as the reality of being called ‘freaky’ by a not-so-grim reaper cracks through the shame and betrayal and anger. “I… what?”

The reaper shrugs. “You and your weird-ass eyes,” he repeats, enunciating slowly this time before he continues, “You’re not dying or anything, and, even if you were psychic, you should only be able to sense me. So I got curious. Sue me.”

“That was over ten years ago,” Michael points out suspiciously.

The frown he gets in return is sour and unhappy. “You have any idea how busy my schedule is?” Michael doesn’t want to know, actually. “So, how ‘bout it?” the reaper blurts, lifting a hand, “Give me a minute to poke around in your head?”

A definitive ‘no’ in on Michael’s lips when he hears the  _crash_  of glass from down the hall, quickly followed by shouting and a sudden resurgence of Gabriel’s voice. The reaper sighs heavily and holds out a hand, palm up. “Okay, fine. You’re busy. Gimme your hands. You _did_  break them on my face, I guess.”

Michael hesitates, but there’s something so damn earnest in the reaper’s expression, and right now he  _needs_  to believe in something. So he gives in, and warm fingers curl carefully around his hands. There’s some weird, innate joy in those blue eyes while they both watch the skin knit back together under a soothing blue glow.

When the reaper lets go, he looks to be in a better mood, and Michael fails to understand why. “Go,” the blonde tells him, “Before they break something else.”

Michael hesitates, but he’s ultimately failed enough for one day. He turns his back on the reaper without a thought and finds Castiel sweeping up the pieces of a broken plate and burnt food from the floor while Anna and Raphael collaborate with Gabriel’s increasingly sour commentary on how to re-wrap the fresh gauze around his shoulder.

The three of them have actually managed a decent job thus far. When Raphael’s gaze meets his, Michael nods his approval and moves to pick up the sharp pieces of glass to avoid Castiel risking his own fingers. He doesn’t think about the strange reaper, doesn’t think about how father hasn’t come home in a week and half, and doesn’t think about Luke alone somewhere he can’t reach, suffering with the demons in his own head.

He wonders if lying to himself will ever get easier.

 

 

 

He sees the reaper here and there after that; they don’t actually talk about anything more than occasional mindless surface chatter, but he becomes something of a presence in Michael’s life. When he’s pulling overtime to keep his family fed and under a roof without father, when he’s walking half-asleep through the store for food, and even while he forces himself to finish assignments for online classes with caffeine and sheer willpower. The reaper is there with a smile and a stray joke. Michael doesn’t take hunts those first couple of years; he doesn’t have the time to risk his life when his remaining brothers and sisters need him to fill in the hole father left.

( _And partially because he has a strange, innate sense that he’ll meet Luke on the other side of the field one day and be forced to choose between his brother and his duty to humanity._ )

That doesn’t mean he doesn’t teach them how to protect themselves. He thinks he’s doing a decent job. Thinks it right up until Gabriel vanishes without a trace.

Luke’s absence hanging over the house has left him so numb he keeps going robotically through the motions for a week before he breaks down and ends up sweeping all the neatly organized pages off of his desk with a shout.

The reaper shows up with a flutter of wings and a hand on his shoulder. They don’t actually talk, but careful, human-shaped hands brush soothing patterns against his back while he sits slumped against his desk. It helps more than it should, taking comfort from an agent of Death.

He goes back to hunting after that, half paranoid that Gabriel was taken rather than left of his own free will. To his great shame, his sisters and remaining brother follow him onto the field within a year after he comes home one day, bloody and half-dead. The reaper never shows up during hunts, and Michael is grateful because they both know what it’ll mean the day he does.

 

 

 

 

He’s twenty-seven and bleeding out against the back wall of a warehouse. He hears the sounds of a car engine and breathes out his relief. Anna and Castiel have pulled Raphael into the car. They’re leaving, and they’ll be  _safe_. He hears the growl of the hellhounds come closer to the ring of salt, and he adjusts his grip on the body-warmed metal of his pistol. There’re worse ways to go, he decides, than saving the last of his broken little family. 

He misses the weight of his mother’s rosary around his wrist, but he’s strangely grateful for the comfort that Raphael has it now. He leans his head back against the wall and watches the impressions of paws come closer in the dusting of snow of the wooden floor. He thinks a thoughtless prayer of gratitude that the pain is already numb, even if it’s so damn cold the hounds’ fiery breath is visible in puffs on the air.

He doesn’t fear death. Doesn’t fear pain. But that doesn’t mean he welcomes either of them.

When the flash of light splashes dots across his vision, he tenses best he can. He fears Raphael talking Anna and Castiel into coming back for him. When the dots clear, the growls are silent, and the reaper is standing just to the side of Michael’s boots inside the circle of salt. This time, it’s Michael who smiles and the reaper who frowns. “Would be you,” he slurs, hating the taste of copper in the back of his throat while he shivers.

It’s so damn cold.

The reaper tries for a smile, but it comes out as more of a twitch than anything. For a second, Michael is transported back to that couch in the living room, his siblings piled around him, while his father tried to fight past his grief. And suddenly he wants to laugh, but he doesn’t have the energy for it. “Yeah,” the reaper says, “I asked to take you over, so… Don’t think it’s 'destiny' or anything.” It’s different than first time. The words don’t have a bite to them. 

“Good,” Michael hums lazily. He feels like he’s high on painkillers from the time he shattered his arm going up against a vampire. Like he’s floating and not as cold because there’s a blanket muffling the world.

The reaper takes one last step forward and crouches down next to Michael. His hands fret with themselves like this isn’t just one of countless similar jobs. “Sorry,” he says, “You’ve got a few extra minutes. I… sort of made that happen.” He gestures guiltily back at the piles of ash Michael guesses were hellhounds. “It would’ve hurt. A lot. More than this, I mean, and it’s not like it’d change anything.” He shrugs, but there’s guilt in his eyes, “You’re the only one I’ve actually known, so…”

“’S okay,” Michael breathes. It takes a surprising effort, but it needs to be said. It’s the most serious thing they’ve said to each other since Luke left.

He misses his little brothers so much it hurts sometimes when he isn't busy pretending they never existed in the first place. He wonders if they’ve grown into men on their own; if Gabriel ever found the freedom he wanted; or if Luke sank into the shadows of his own mind and let the monster win. He wonders if Luke even made it long enough to get that choice, and it makes him sick with shame this time. Maybe he should have fought—listened when he said he could control it.

He wants to ask the reaper if his brothers lived, but he’s so afraid of the answer, and it’s too little too late anyway. It’s the coward’s way out, and he hates that he can never bring himself to fight his own head when it probably matters most.

Instead, he watches the reaper, savoring the last little bit of clarity. He wants to ask ‘Do you have a name?’ because it’s been something of a game between them. Cat and mouse this whole time. He doesn’t really want to die without knowing.

All he manages is “Name?” instead.

Luckily, the reaper gets it because his gaze softens. His smile is gentle and small, and Michael thinks he likes it. “Adam,” he says, “Like the first of you.”

Michael tries to smile, but he’s not so sure if it works. He’s almost ready to shut his eyes now, and he thinks about something Luke had him watch once: a movie with a line about wise men greeting Death like a friend. He doesn’t know about wise men, but he doesn’t think this is so bad.

A familiar, warm hand presses against his shoulder while the other sets against his forehead. This close, Adam is so wonderfully warm. Breath brushes against his hair, and Michael shuts his eyes, savoring being held for the first time in so long. “Hey, ‘s alright, okay?” Adam tells him. His voice almost cracks and Michael’s thoughts are way too fuzzy to figure out why. A hand cards through his hair. “It’s time to rest now. I'll take care of you; I promise.”

For the first time he can remember, Michael quits fighting and lets go.

 

 

 

 

He’s ten and sitting on the couch with Anna sleeping against one side and Raphael against the other. Baby Castiel rests soundly against his chest while Gabriel watches his cartoons a few feet away. Luke sits on the floor, back against the couch, lazily brushed up against Michael’s leg. Father and mother are at the table, laughing about some convention they busted a ghost at a long time ago. 

Michael doesn’t understand why he sometimes feels like laughing until he cries.

He doesn’t understand why sometimes, when he looks at Anna and Raphael, he sees women instead of children. He shouldn’t know Castiel will be awkward with people, even with his dry sense of humor and recklessly loving heart. Sometimes there’s something inherently  _wrong_  about most of them being together, like mother, Luke, father, and Gabriel shouldn’t even be there.

Sometimes he turns the TV off to search the screen for something he doesn’t understand and can’t find, and sometimes he looks in the mirror to see a fully grown man staring back at him past tired green eyes.

He doesn’t understand until the thundering chorus interrupts his patchwork paradise – not until he’s clawing his way up out of the earth and gasping for air in the night.

He looks behind him, at the makeshift grave marker and the old, worn rosary wrapped around the top of it and knows with sudden, horrible clarity what’s happened.

“Hey.”

Michael shoots around to find Adam standing on the grass-covered bottom of the unmarked grave, hands shoved awkwardly in his pockets. There’s something dark and cautious in his eyes that sets Michael ill at ease on instinct. He grits his teeth and forces himself to shift through the abnormally loose earth to pull himself completely free. “I thought you said you’d take care of it,” he snaps irritably.

Apparently being dead for a while does wonders for wearing away at his thin patience. 

Or perhaps it’s the fact that he’s just spent an indefinite amount of time wallowing in some bastardization of his own most painful ( _most cherished_ ) memories and the hopes he likes to ignore he once had.

Adam’s scowl is suddenly much closer when he crouches down in front of Michael. It’s a strange juxtaposition that he holds out a hand to help with that look on his face. “I  _did_ ,” he counters sternly, “You’re the one with the freaky-ass soul. You have any idea how much trouble you caused the guys upstairs trying to keep you happy and blissfully ignorant? People don't usually fight their own personal heaven, Shurley.”

Michael takes the offered hand even as he growls out an irritable “Good.”

There’s a hint of that inhuman strength as Adam, with his lankier frame, tugs Michael up onto his feet like he weighs as much as a child. 

Not for the first time, the human realizes that there’s physically no way he should have been able to crawl his way out of the ground like that on his own. Not when he’s been in there long enough for a healthy covering of grass to cover most of the empty grave and his limbs to shake with exhaustion and overexertion simply under his own weight. When he looks back at Adam, he expects the scowl; he gets an amused smirk instead.

Never one to linger in self-pity and indulgence, Michael makes a futile effort to brush some of the dirt off of his tattered clothes and gather up the equally tattered remains of his composure and pride. He meets Adam’s gaze significantly and asks, “Why am I alive, Adam?”

The amused little quirk of the reaper’s lips falls back into the guarded look. “Humanity needs your help,” he says ominously, “ _I_  need your help.”

He isn’t sure what it means that, even then, he knows he’ll give it. 


End file.
